Pages - Menu

19 December 2014

Should I still support/watch the NFL?

Andrew Forbes explains why he gave up on the NFL this year. This essay captures a lot of my feelings about the state of NFL and football as a sport. I have not forsaken it quite yet, but draw closer.

It’s a small, unimportant thing, the game of football, but for a long, long time, it was a large part of my life. Which inherently means that this exercise has been an inquiry into self, too; an effort to eliminate something dear from my life and gauge the results of its absence. Piecemeal self-negation, if you will. A slow removal of certain Jenga blocks in order to see how many can be taken away before I topple altogether.

But maybe it’s even more than that. Maybe I’m asking the question: Is it right for me to watch the NFL? Maybe it’s just reassuring to know that it’s okay to ask such questions.

There is no clear answer here, and that doesn’t much concern me; some things can’t or shouldn’t be clear, or definite. I can’t adequately define love, but I couldn’t live in a universe devoid of it. Perhaps the point of such self-inquiry is to silently arrive at greater awareness, and then to assimilate that knowledge without proselytizing to our fellow citizens. For each of us to arrive at these things independently, in our own private darknesses. I guess that’s possible. If so, I have to accept the possibility that by broadcasting my journey into self-discovery here, you might deem my inquiry to have been a futile one.